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But in fact everything follows its own Kind; the birth is a
horse because it comes from the Horse Kind, a man by springing
from the Human Kind; offspring answers to species. Allow the
kosmic circuit its part, a very powerful influence upon the thing
brought into being: allow the stars a wide material action upon
the bodily part of the man, producing heat and cold and their
natural resultants in the physical constitution; still does such
action explain character, vocation and especially all that seems
quite independent of material elements, a man taking to letters,
to geometry, to gambling, and becoming an originator in any of
these pursuits? And can we imagine the stars, divine beings,
bestowing wickedness? And what of a doctrine that makes them
wreak vengeance, as for a wrong, because they are in their
decline or are being carried to a position beneath the earth- as
if a decline from our point of view brought any change to
themselves, as if they ever ceased to traverse the heavenly
spheres and to make the same figure around the earth.
Nor may we think that these divine beings lose or gain in
goodness as they see this one or another of the company in
various aspects, and that in their happier position they are
benignant to us and, less pleasantly situated, turn maleficent.
We can but believe that their circuit is for the protection of
the entirety of things while they furnish the incidental service
of being letters on which the augur, acquainted with that
alphabet, may look and read the future from their pattern-
arriving at the thing signified by such analogies as that a
soaring bird tells of some lofty event.
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